2012 Olympics

Like most people, these last two weeks I have been captivated by the spectacle that is the Olympic Games. In a summer that has been defined by such tragedies as mass shootings in Colorado and Wisconsin and an increasingly violent civil war in Syria, watching Olympic athletes vie for medals in largely peaceful competition offers some much-needed respite.

This week local judo fighter Nick Delpopolo became the first Olympic athlete to be disqualified from competing after an in-competition drug test. It wasn’t steroids or human growth hormone that got him kicked off the American squad, it was a positive test for marijuana, which was added to the International Olympic Committee’s banned substances list following a positive test in 1998.